Thursday, December 31, 2009

From the BBC, August 2007A bottle of champagne believed to have been taken from Hitler's wine cellar by an allied soldier has been sold at auction in Dorset for £1,400.The bottle of 1937 Moet and Chandon went under the hammer at Charterhouse auctioneers in Sherborne and was bought by a Swedish television company.

But champagne does not age well and the tipple is unlikely to be drinkable.

The bottle was given to solicitor Nigel Wilson by a soldier as a thank you gift for some legal work 15 years ago.

Monday, December 28, 2009

My close friend & colleague, Octavio Coleman of the Jejune Institute scooped this one from the New York Times.Deadly Style: Bauhaus’s Nazi ConnectionBy NICHOLAS FOX WEBERPublished: December 23, 2009IN the catalog preface for “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” a comprehensive survey now up at the Museum of Modern Art, the curators write about the museum’s — and America’s — last major exhibition on the subject, in 1938. That show, they maintain, offered a scattershot presentation of the Bauhaus, complety ignoring its last five years, after Walter Gropius, the school’s larger-than-life founding director, had resigned. Not coincidentally, they suggest, most Americans have a limited understanding even now of what the Bauhaus accomplished or how it fit into the history of its time. We think of the word Bauhaus as shorthand for “an international modern style unmoored from any particular moment,” the curators write, and their show, on view through Jan. 25, does a lot to counter this impression. It connects the evolution of Bauhaus art and design — painting, furniture, glass constructions, metalwork, photography, textiles and theater design — with the extreme social and political changes that roiled Germany during the Weimar Republic. More than 400 works by artists and designers including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy testify to the wealth of visions and the shifting social contexts that shaped the school up to its tragic end in 1933, when its remaining faculty members shut it down rather than work with the Nazis. Of course when an institution is as influential as the Bauhaus, even the most repressive totalitarian regime cannot totally defeat it. Leah Dickerman, the curator of the MoMA show with the museum’s curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll, points out that the Bauhaus left a particularly important “divided legacy” on its own home turf after the war, from the International Style towers and high-end consumer products of West Germany’s economic miracle to the endless rows of workers’ housing that came to define the East. Until recently, however, few who have studied the school’s history, including me — I run the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and wrote a book called “The Bauhaus Group” — have been aware of how palpably its influence lived on in the Third Reich. The story of what happened after the Gestapo padlocked the last Bauhaus facility, in Berlin, has always been about flight and persecution. Most of the school’s artists and artisans left the country, many for America; the few who remained, it has been thought, were Jews who did not get out in time. But this summer and fall at the Neue Museum in Weimar, the city where the school got its start, another exhibition told a different story, of a Bauhaus-trained painter and architect who applied the school’s aesthetic advances to concentration camp design. Franz Ehrlich, who had studied with Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and Josef Albers, began working for the Nazis as a prisoner at Buchenwald, then continued long after his release. It is impossible to determine to what extent Ehrlich was a collaborator, a victim and resistance worker, or something in between. His story is not unlike that of many Germans of the time. But that may be what is most unsettling about him for those of us used to thinking of the Bauhaus — that wellspring of idealistism and innovation — as a world apart in prewar German culture, untainted by Hitler’s regime. And Ehrlich was not alone, as a Weimar-based Bauhaus scholar who helped organize the show pointed out as I stood with her at the wrought-iron gates of Buchenwald on the city’s outskirts, shuddering to realize that the lettering on them was pure Bauhaus. Ehrlich, their designer, was not the only Bauhausler to put his progressive training to work for the Third Reich, she said, just one about whom a great deal has lately been learned — including his connection to this particularly chilling symbol of the Nazi era. Ehrlich, who was arrested as a Communist in 1935, arrived at Buchenwald two years later, when the camp was still new and had only a few temporary structures. Like all prisoners there he was immediately forced into hard labor, but after two weeks he walked into the joinery workshop, declared himself an architect — he had worked in Gropius’s Berlin office — and began to draw at a drafting table. Rather than report him to the SS, the prisoner in charge assigned him to design and build the entrance gates. From then on, the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others who were brought to Buchenwald to be worked to death entered on foot under Ehrilich’s elegant rendereding of the words “Jedem das Seine”: “To each his own.” It was a translation of a Roman legal maxim invoking the individual’s right to enjoy what is his, but — like the recently stolen “Work makes you free” sign at Auschwitz — recast with a sneer, in this case as a sort of cynical “Everyone gets his just deserts.” The stylish sans-serif lettering reflected Ehrlich’s training under the Bauhaus typography master Joost Schmidt.READ THE WHOLE THING HERE

Friday, December 25, 2009

Hitler's enemies lie when they say that Christmas has been abolished in Germany.This is the truth: Hitler had thousands of Autobahn workers as his guests in the Berlin Sportpalast at Christmas 1938. Note the Christmas trees. Hitler celebrates Christmas with his soldiers, next to a decorated Christmas tree.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

How Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of ChristmasFrom the Daily MailNazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, 'Germanic' cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown. The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler's Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition. Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments. She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration. Selected objects from the family's enormous collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne. 'Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis - after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,' Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. 'The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.' The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals. The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin. The symbol that posed a particular problem for the Nazis was the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees. Civilians were encouraged to send patriotic Christmas cards to soldiers at the front. The Iron Cross shaped Christmas tree decorations commemorate the start of World War One. 'Either it was a six-pointed star, which was a symbol of the Jews, or it was a five-pointed star, which represented the Soviets,' Breuer said. It had to go. In the 1930s, the Nazis tried to change the ideology of Christmas. But when World War II started, the focus became more practical. There were also tips on how to make Christmas cookies in the face of food shortages.In 1944-1945, the Nazis tried to reinvent the festival once again as a day to commemorate the dead, in particular fallen soldiers. 'By then nobody felt like celebrating,' Breuer explained. Happily, the German people mostly ignored the clumsy propaganda efforts and continued with the same traditions as before. The is a legacy of the Nazi Christmas. The wartime version of the traditional Christmas carol 'Unto us a time has come' is still sung. 'The Nazis took out the references to Jesus and made it into a song about walking through the snow,' Breuer said. Surprisingly, German churches put up little opposition to the Nazification of Christmas. 'You would have expected them to protest loudly and insist that it was a Christian festival,' said Breuer. 'But instead they largely kept quiet, out of fear.'

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

I was just thinking about how I needed to find an image of Santa beating up Hitler (without reusing this image), so I decided to visit the wonderful Hitler Getting Punched blog, and what they have posted today is even better:

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Anyone involved in any socio-reengineering projects has undoubtedly come up against the immensity of Christmas. Most historically notable were the Roman Catholics coming up against Christmas & rolling with it, changing the publicly acknowledged birthdate of Jesus in order to fit into an already popular winter festival. It's the nature of culture, you wrap the old in the new & soon they become one. It should be no surprise that the Nazis, in their attempt at socio-reengineering Germany would do the same.

By Francois BeckerCOLOGNE, Germany — Presents wrapped in paper covered with Nazi symbols nestling beneath a tree adorned with swastikas and grenade-shaped baubles: welcome to Christmas under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. As a new exhibition in the western German city of Cologne shows, the Nazis tried to skew the Christmas story to do away with the Jewish baby Jesus and impose their racist ideology and propaganda on the popular festival. "Celebrating the birth of a Jewish baby was unthinkable for the Nazis," Juergen Mueller, the chief researcher behind the exhibition, told AFP. "But Christmas was too popular to be banned. They therefore decided to corrupt it." Nazi officials "invented a Germanic origin" for Christmas, renaming it "Julfest" and claiming that yuletide traditions stemmed from ancient rituals surrounding the winter solstice four days earlier, Mueller added. Baby Jesus was turfed out of the crib and Santa Claus was reincarnated as a Viking knight. In addition, the regime also created bizarre Nazi Christmas symbols, including swastika-shaped tins for Christmas cakes and Christmas cards emblazoned with a bullet wrapped in fir. The creator of the exhibition -- named "Far From A Holy Night" -- got the idea as she was scouring flea markets for Christmas memorabilia. "I wanted to have an 'old-style' Christmas for my father's 70th birthday ... that's when I started to come across these objects," Rita Breuer told AFP. The objects "tell a story not often told," she said, adding that she hoped the exhibition would prompt historians to do more research on the subject.Ironically, some Nazi Christmas items, such as the wrapping paper emblazoned with twisted crosses, were later banned for fear that children would tear the beloved symbol of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, explained Mueller, some of the Nazis' corruptions of Christmas have since been adopted by today's neo-Nazis in Germany.Among the memorabilia available is a CD of Christmas songs, with an innocent-looking sleeve of a snowy landscape, but with the songs rewritten by the Nazis and all references to Christianity expunged. "Many visitors are amazed to discover that the version of the song they know is not the original but the way the Nazis re-wrote them," said Mueller. Germans still buy so-called "Julleuchter" -- Christmas lanterns -- without knowing they were popularised by Hitler's sidekick Heinrich Himmler in 1938, with tens of thousands of them being manufactured by concentration camp prisoners. Nevertheless, despite traces of the Nazis' Christmas corruption still remaining, the Third Reich generally failed to dampen the Christmas spirit in Germany. "During this period, the Germans kept the link with the Christian festival, even if the symbols were no longer used," said Mueller.The exhibition is hosted by the Cologne centre for Nazi research and runs until January 17.

It has been several years since we published the fourth edition of this book. In that time we have accumulated a substantial amount of new documentation supporting our thesis that the Nazi Party was conceived, organized and controlled throughout its short history by masculine-oriented male homosexuals who hid their sexual proclivities from the public, in part by publicly persecuting one group of their political enemies: out-of-the-closet effeminate-oriented homosexuals aligned with the German Communist Party. During that same time, our detractors, mostly "gay" political activists, have increased their attacks on the book, primarily by ridiculing its premise, but occasionally by challenging certain facts or sources. They are rightly concerned that this book threatens their long-standing public-relations strategy of posing as victims to win public support for their political agenda. When the first edition of The Pink Swastika was published in 1995, the homosexual community was heavily invested in a campaign to equate homosexuals with Jews as Nazi victims in order to exploit the Holocaust for their political advantage. The primary symbol of their movement at that time was the inverted pink triangle, which had been used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals interned in German work camps during the Third Reich, and it was common to hear "gay" activists talk about "the Gay Holocaust." The Pink Swastika was written to challenge that campaign. Because, while there certainly were some homosexual victims of the Nazi regime, and a record of harsh public condemnation of homosexuality by the Nazi Party, the true, complete story of homosexuality in Nazi and pre-Nazi Germany does not in the least help the "gay" cause. If The Pink Swastika were the "pack of lies" the homosexual movement claims it is, the book would not have influenced their "Gay Holocaust" strategy in the smallest degree. It would have been easy to discredit and disregard. Instead, how did the "gay" leaders respond to its challenge? They stopped talking about the Nazis almost entirely and changed their symbol from the pink triangle to the rainbow flag. We prevailed in our campaign. And our research was implicitly vindicated. However, the attacks continued and now various, ostensibly non-homosexual surrogates have taken up the "gay" effort to discredit the book. This edition of The Pink Swastika is designed to once-and-for-all silence the critics by emphasizing the strength of our documentation. The Internet is particularly helpful in this task because we can provide direct links to supporting documents and websites, pictures, graphics, video clips and other resources right alongside the text in an interactive format. We hope you find The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party 5th (Internet) Edition useful and informative.

Bonus gag for you: Rabbi walks into Jewish bakery, says, "How much does this challah cost?" Old lady with numbers tattoo'd on her wrist falls over backwards.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

From the Daily Mail, always has some sort of articles about Hitler.He has gone down as one of the world's bloodiest dictators, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Adolf Hitler portrayed himself as a fearless ruler who was afraid of no-one. But behind closed doors, the Nazi leader was terrified of one thing - going to the dentist. His personal dentist Johannes Blaschke revealed how Hitler once insisted simple root-canal work was spread over eight days because he 'couldn't stand the pain.' Hitler also had 'terribly bad breath, abscesses and gum disease', a new book about Blaschke claims. The book, entitled 'Dentist of the Devil' by Menevse Deprem-Hennen, she chronicles the work of Blaschke, who was in charge of the Fuehrer's gnashers for nearly 20 years. Two months ago another book about Hitler's general state of health suggested, without any documentary proof, that Hitler had fillings in his mouth made from the gold teeth of extermination camp victims. But the records of Blaschke show no such gold was used on him although he did use it on SS men in his care. Deprem-Hennen accessed Blaschke's hitherto unseen medical files on Hitler and other leading Nazis who were his patients in the 1930s and 40s. 'Everyone who knew something about the status of Hitler's teeth was of supreme interest to the Allies after the war because of the few remains of his skull and jawbone found in the ruins of the bunker in Berlin where he committed suicide in 1945,' she said. 'Blaschke, who had the rank of a Major General in the Waffen SS, was shown some records from the Americans who had him in a PoW camp in a bid to confirm that Hitler was dead.' While the Russians, who discovered Hitler's charred corpse along with that of his new bride Eva Braun, could not get their hands on Blaschke, they did find his assistant Kaethe Heusermann. 'Afterwards,' said Deprem-Hennen, 'she vanished for ten years in the Soviet gulag.' Most of Hitler's medical records allegedly burned before Berlin fell in May 1945 when one of the last aircraft to leave the besieged city was shot down. 'But,' said the author, 'many documents remained at Blaschke's practice. Fedor Bruck, a Jewish dentist, who survived the war hidden in Berlin, took over this practice at the end of the war and found them before the Russians woke up to the fact.' Bruck emigrated to America in 1947 taking the details of the Fuehrer's fillings with him. They later passed into the possession of his son Wolfgang who went on to work as a lawyer in the state chancellery in Duesseldorf. Deprem-Hennen said she befriended him as she was working on her dental doctorate after he said: 'I think I have some interesting documents for you.' She said: 'I used them as the basis for my graduation project although the professor of medical history at the university was reluctant to recognise their worth at first, probably thinking back to the falsified Hitler Diaries scandal. But in the end he verified them as genuine.' She worked on the records for six years. 'It was clear that Blaschke was extremely proud of his role as dentist to Hitler, but his patient was not so enthusiastic. 'He said he "dreaded" getting into the dentist's chair. The incident about the root canal that he had to do over eight meetings highlights this phobia he had. 'Also, he suffered more pain following the assassination attempt in July 1944 when he was hit with splinters in the face.' Blaschke noted he had a bridge on the right side of his mouth which he complained had 'moved and someone had better put it back pretty damned quick.' Blaschke also said he suffered terribly from bad breath, abscesses and gum disease and he put 10 fillings into his mouth in 1944 alone. The head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, was also treated by the 'Devil's Dentist' He noted that much of what caused him pain in later life was probably due to his poor diet as a down-and-out on the streets of pre-WW1 Vienna where Hitler lived like a tramp. Hermann Goering, the bombastic Nazi Luftwaffe chief who invented the dreaded Gestapo in 1934, was such a coward that Blaschke noted; 'He cried before he even got in the chair. 'Prosthetics had to be made for him, and ready, on the same day because he "could not run around as the head of the Luftwaffe with missing teeth".' Hitler was known in his inner circle as being squeamish when it came to his teeth. His interpreter, Paul Schmidt, said that Hitler was once so frustrated after talks with Spain's General Franco failed to bring him into the war that he told his Italian ally Benito Mussolini: 'I would rather have two or three teeth out than go through that again!' Deprem-Hennen notes in her book that while Blaschke, who died in 1957, was a die-hard Nazi who knew 'where all the gold from extermination camp victims had come from to be used in fillings for SS men,' he was not incapable of showing kindness. 'He used to carry the paralysed Jewish landlord of the mansion where he lived into the bomb shelter when the Allied planes were overhead,' she said.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Krampus is a mythical creature who accompanies Saint Nicholas in various regions of the world during the Christmas season. The word Krampus originates from the Old High German word for claw (Krampen). In the Alpine regions, Krampus is represented by a demon-like creature accompanying Saint Nicholas. Krampus acts in conjunction with Saint Nicholas; the latter gives gifts to good children, while the Krampus gives warnings and punishments to the bad children. Traditionally, young men dress up as the Krampus in the first two weeks of December, particularly in the evening of December 5, and roam the streets frightening children and women with rusty chains and bells. In some rural areas the tradition also includes birching by Krampus, especially of young females.You can get this set of 1.25" Krampus buttons featuring Red Krampus & Black Krampus by Blitzkrieg Buttons for $3 ppd. Just paypal gogoblinko at gmail.com OR send $3 hidden cash to pobox 12044 Eugene OR 97440. Orders will be filled as soon as they are received.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Adolf Hitler's obsession with his mother's death after her treatment for cancer by a Jewish doctor was the cause of the Holocaust, according to a book published in Germany today. It argues that Hitler believed his mother, Klara, was poisoned by Dr Eduard Bloch and his grief was a cause of his anti-semitism. Klara died in 1907, aged 47, when Hitler was 18. A devout Roman Catholic, she died from idoform poisoning caused by her treatment of her breast cancer, a common medical practice at the time. 'Her painful death was a key moment in his development,' said Joachim Riecker, author of the book, November 9: How World War One Led To The Holocaust. 'Hitler never forgave the Jewish doctor. In conversations with aides such as Josef Goebbels he referred to the Jews as being like TB and himself as a "healer" who had to stamp it, and consequently them, out.' Dr Bloch later emigrated from Austria to the US and died in 1945. The book goes against conventional wisdom which has emphasised the young Hitler's respect for the doctor. It also highlights the significance of November 9. This was the date of the birth of the Weimar Republic in 1918, the date when Hitler attempted to seize power in 1923 and the night in 1938 when he launched the Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews; the precursor to the Holocaust.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Horrorcaust from Brass Eye. Sorry, no embedding!Brass Eye is a UK television series of satirical spoof documentaries. A single series of six episodes aired on Channel 4 in 1997, with a further special episode in 2001.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Pete Doherty booed off stage for singing Nazi anthemFrom the London Telegraph.Pete Doherty, the singer and songwriter, has been removed from the stage during a solo performance in Germany after he sang a Nazi anthem.

The lead singer of rock band Babyshambles began singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles', which was used as the national anthem under the Third Reich.An outraged crowd at the on3 music festival in Munich began booing and shouting, but Doherty carried on singing five more songs before festival organisers ushered him from the stage.The concert was also being broadcast live on Bavarian radio. Broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk cut the broadcast as soon as Doherty, a surprise guest at the music festival, began his song.'Deutschland über alles' is the first verse of 'Deutschlandlied', a song written by Joseph Haydn in 1797. The third verse of 'Deutschlandlied' is used as the current German national anthem, and has the same tune as 'Deutschland über alles'.However, the first verse has not been officially sung since the Second World War because of its association with the Nazis. Its opening lyrics translate as: “Germany, Germany above anything/Above everything in the world”.It is not the first time Doherty, the former lead singer of The Libertines, has been embroiled in Nazi-themed controversy. A track entitled ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on The Libertines, the band’s 2004 album, attracted criticism for taking its name from the slogan placed above the entrances of Nazi concentration camps.Chief prosecutor Barbara Stockinger told the Bavarian newspaper TZ that they were examining Doherty’s performance closely, but were not currently treating it as a crime.